15 August 05
Calligraphy Into Font II
I’m now well underway with the project of turning my foundational hand into a font. It’s extremely slow work, of course, though now that I’m getting the workflow down, things will move ahead more quickly. At right are the first four glyphs I’m happy with. Ninety-five more to go after that, and then comes setting the character widths, kerning, and finally hinting!
2 August 05
Fun Package in the Mail
A wonderful thing! A package arrived from Japan today with many pens, none of which you can get here. There are also two Pentel waterbrushes (at least I think that’s what they are; my Japanese isn’t so hot).
Thanks, Butuki. I’ll post a sketch the minute I get to it. (By the way: how exactly do you make a riceball?)
I returned from my Hebrew class tonight with the sense of triumph appropriate to having composed my first sentence.
30 July 05
Calligraphy Into Font
Perhaps it’s a midsummer thing but once again I’m interested in the project of turning our calligraphy hands into fonts. Regardless of how these work as typefaces, having a digital representation of a calligraphy hand will be extremely useful in solving calligraphic layout and design problems. Luckily, there’s a good freeware font design program to get started with this task—namely FontForge.
23 July 05
Blood, Gore, and Fegato
My class in uncial is winding down. It almost didn’t finish at all, but some quick footwork on the part of the teachers found us an alternative site for our class when the old one blew up (or rather was disconnected by a disgruntled computer person).
Uncial has many connotations. It’s invariably the script used around witchcraft, good or bad, on television or in shop windows. Given that the Irish variant was used for centuries (and still is) in Ireland, it often gives a Celtic flavor to whatever you’re writing. I’m not Irish though my accent sometimes leads people to think I might be—and I do have a kind of horror of piggy-backing on someone else’s culture.
I was going to do a quote from Beowulf, but I’d want to do it in the Old English as well as the translation, and that seemed cumbersome. Plus it’s translated by Famous Seamus, see horror in paragraph #2 above.
So instead I have been immersing myself in a piece written by Elck of the late lamented Vernacular Body. It concerns the liver, which seems an admirable subject for a hand as old and venerable and earthy and be-wormed as uncial. Here’s an excerpt:
4. Livered.
A bloody formless mass sitting in the inner dark. Brooding, suppurating, sweating like an injured animal. Prometheus on the Caucasus, delivered. Fava beans, Chianti.
(We have not eaten fava beans tonight but we did have lentils cooked in the solar cooker with tomatoes and capers, and cracked open a bottle of Fat Llama Chilean Cab, which is a lot chewier than Chianti. A la tienne, Elck.)
16 July 05
Reptile Refuge
We went to the Sacramento Zoo today to take a class on drawing animals. Our instructor was Robert Dvorak, who taught the travel sketching course we took here in April. The Sacramento Zoo is a good size for this exercise, it being easy to do the rounds in a half-day. We started at the flamingos, visited the hornbills and griffon vulture, and ended up at the giraffes (a challenge to get all angles and legs on the page, particularly when they move) before breaking for lunch.
By that time I was in my rhythm. We continued on to the zebras, bongo-bongos, orangutans, and chimpanzees. We moved on to the big cats, but they were all in their shelters from the heat. We got the hint and proceeded to take refuge in the coolness of the Reptile House. A wise move, since it got to be 104° F today in Sacramento. The reptiles are fun to draw. They like holding interesting poses, the lizards have great scales, fringes, and eyes, and you can get up close to them. (None of them came through the glass, despite it being Harry Potter day.) At right is a drawing I did of a flat-tailed tortoise from Madagascar, done with a non-waterproof roller ball pen and light wash.
3 July 05
Emerging from the Deep
Advice to designers, editors, dissertation writers, and anyone who’s contemplating a big desktop publishing job in the future, imminent or otherwise:
a) make copious, redundantly copious, stupidly copious, backups. So when you accidentally overwrite a file of fifty pages with only the first page, all you have to do is go to the last backup and enter (tediously, admittedly) all the latest iteration of edits, not retype the whole thing. I know there are people who know how to retrieve supposedly lost file copies but they aren’t around at six in the morning or nine at night on the weekend. And I’m not one of those people anyway.
b) never, ever make global changes of anything when you’re tired. This is the way to end up with sentences that start like this: “In generallifornia…”
c) resize all your fifty gigantic maps BEFORE you need to go to Kinko’s on Friday night and it’s due on Tuesday after a holiday weekend with a skeleton staff of people who will be working at three in the morning with more or less of a clue.
d) don’t eat that extra scoop of ice cream before going to bed. Do you really need your heart racing that fast?
e) decide on a style and STICK to it. The Central Valley/Bay-Delta controversy has changed so many times over the last week I’m still not sure where we are with it, but I think it’s changing anyway, to Central Valley and Bay-Delta, hyphen not endash. But this will have to be in the next draft. As it went to press it was Central Valley and Bay-Delta (endash).
f) When compiling styles for multiple documents be sure, always, to set them in the master document, not in satellites. I have a style called Appendix Chapter Title, appchtitle, appcht, and probably one other one. They all do more or less the same thing. More or less. The less part is going to harrass me for days.
During this past week I’ve hardly even read email, let alone read blogs. I hope to rectify this now.
I did hear from my sister about the legalization of gay marriage in Spain: GO SPAIN. Thirty years ago, when we lived there, a mere suspicion that someone was gay or lesbian was enough to land them in jail. Reading through the Spanish press subsequently the general tone seemed to be this: and you have a problem with this why, exactly?
27 June 05
From the Trenches
If typefaces were colors, Perpetua would sing quinacridone magenta, then shift up an italic octave to California sunrises. I am swimming in Perpetua these days, which is slightly decadent, slightly not quite anybody’s mandated style, slightly involves flying under the radar of the various style dictators. I have no business having this much fun on a project that is so big, so consuming, so apparently stressful. I’m not stressed. Milagro.
Sabon would be blue, dark blue, but not quite Prussian. Garamond would also be blue but lighter. Cochin would surely be cochineal, ludicrous, outlandish, especially with that italic “n,” dancing on a page like a medieval tumbler.
Berkeley, my bread-and-butter, would bear the golden crust of homemade loaves.
Helvetica, of course, black. And Futura. And Gill Sans. Hmm. Something about those sans-serifs, lining up behind the Trajan column again. Perhaps they are only slate gray, perhaps tinged with light green, like smooth serpentine slopes with a red splash of Clarkia.
Arial is not a typeface. It’s a bastardized corporate THING. It is gray-brown, not organic soil, not the beautiful shiny chestnut of a buckeye or loquat seed, not the textured beauty of walnut desks, not the gold on an eagle’s coverts, but sludge.
16 June 05
Unplanned Museum Outing
As soon as I stepped off the plane yesterday, I saw an ad outside the gate for an art exhibit entitled Illuminating the Word: the Saint John’s Bible at the Minneapolis Institute for the Arts. As Pica puts it, the creation of the St. John’s bible is the calligraphic event of the last half-millenium, so I figured if I could possibly try to make the exhibit in my crammed schedule, I would.
It turns out the museum is open in the evening tonight, and there is a ticket slot available for a 6 PM visit, so off I go! The logistical complication is that there is a conference social event this evening at historic Ft. Snelling going from 5:30 to 10 PM, so rather than take the bus running from the conference hotel to the fort, I’m going to make my way there after my museum outing using bus and light rail.
All the running around will be worth it—I don’t think this is an exhibit to be missed since I’m in town.
15 May 05
Heavenly Thistle
Artichokes for dinner. Yum.
11 May 05
Shipment O’Goodies
It’s a fine day when the box of ordered art supplies arrives.